Taking my own advice

09/01/26

In prior roles, I had the privilege of coaching principals, superintendents, and leaders across very different organizations. And despite the differences in context, there were a handful of things I found myself saying over and over again.

Now, two years into the superintendency, I find myself needing to remember my own advice.

First: power can be intoxicating. Stay centered.
Leadership gives you access, attention, influence, and eventually, if you are not careful, a distorted sense of your own importance. So I would ask leaders: What will keep you tethered to yourself? Who knew you before the title? Who tells you the truth? What practices remind you that the position is something you occupy, not something you are?
Power is not inherently dangerous. Forgetting yourself inside of it is.

Second: understand projection.
The higher you rise in an organization, the less people experience only you. They also experience the title, the authority, and every previous relationship they have had with power. Admiration, disappointment, fear, resistance, hope, anger, all of it can find its way to you, particularly in moments of complexity.
You have to develop the wisdom to ask: What belongs to me here? What should I learn from? And what am I carrying that was never mine?

Third: years three and four may be the hardest.
I used to tell leaders this because the first years are often about listening, learning, building trust, and understanding the organization. Then comes a different responsibility: acting on what you have learned.
I am approaching that threshold now.
There are things I have upheld simply because they are how things have been done around here. Two years in, I can see places where we have more potential and capacity than our current structures allow. And I also know that changing structures means changing routines, roles, and sometimes identities. People form identities around their work. So even a change that makes perfect organizational sense can feel deeply personal.
That means my questions are changing.
Instead of sitting in my office discussing a program, why don't we go see it? Let's visit where the work is happening, identify what is extraordinary, and figure out how to replicate it.

Instead of solving the individual problem someone just brought me, I am learning to ask: Did I just hear one problem or seven examples of the same structural problem? And if it is structural, let's have the courage to change the structure.
Leadership cannot only be responsive. Eventually, it must become architectural.

Fourth: carry a tremendous amount of empathy.
Change is hard. So is staying the same. People are carrying histories, pressures, fears, hopes, families, ambitions, disappointments, and things we will never know about. Empathy does not mean avoiding difficult decisions. In fact, I think mature leadership requires the ability to be both deeply compassionate and exceedingly clear.
We can change something and still honor what came before it. We can hold people accountable without diminishing them. We can move forward without pretending movement doesn't sometimes feel like loss.

And fifth: stress is relative.
What feels manageable to me may feel enormous to someone else. What feels enormous to me may be invisible to another person. Leadership has taught me not to measure someone else's capacity against my own nervous system.
People deserve grace without having to prove that what they are carrying is heavy enough.
Perhaps that is the humbling thing about giving leadership advice: eventually life hands it back to you as an assignment.

I am entering a season where some things need to change because I can now see what might be possible. The challenge is to make those changes without losing the very things I have spent years telling other leaders to protect: humility in power, discernment in complexity, courage in change, empathy for people, and grace for the weight we each carry.

Evaluate & Continue

08/25/26

I completed my first superintendent evaluation, and perhaps appropriately, I have been thinking about it ever since.

The process felt surprisingly foreign to me. I grew up professionally in education (teacher, coach, principal, district leader) and evaluation was always part of the rhythm of the work. There were observations, standards, evidence, feedback, goals. But this was different. A superintendent evaluation asks you to step outside of work that is enormous, deeply collective, and never really finished and somehow assess your own contribution to it.

I felt almost compelled to make sure my Board had all the data. Every outcome. Every measure. Every piece of evidence that could help them understand not simply what I had done, but what we had accomplished.

And then came the strange task of self-evaluation.

I have very high standards for myself, so “grading” myself is complicated. I can simultaneously see how much we have accomplished and how much remains undone. I can be proud of our progress and still see every place where we can be better. Perhaps that is one of the tensions of leadership: gratitude for how far you have come cannot become complacency about how far there is still to go.

There is also something inherently serious and traditionally quite private about an evaluation. But I believe public leadership requires transparency. My evaluation is public; I even include the link on my public résumé. If I am asking people to trust me with the stewardship of a public institution, then I should be willing to be held publicly accountable for that stewardship.

I also want us to acknowledge the complexity of what we are attempting together. A school district is thousands of people making thousands of decisions every day on behalf of children. No superintendent creates its successes alone. Every accolade attributed to me belongs to an extraordinary collective of educators, leaders, employees, families, students, community partners, and a team that works incredibly hard, communicates openly, and leads with transparency and integrity.

That realization has already changed how I want to approach next year.

Next year, I don’t want us to think only about a superintendent evaluation. I want us to think about a district evaluation.

Because this cannot become a cult of personality.

Leadership matters. Accountability matters. The superintendent matters. But sustainable excellence cannot depend upon one person. It has to live in our systems, our culture, our classrooms, our relationships, our decisions, and our collective commitment to clear goals and outcomes for students. The measure of leadership should not simply be How did the superintendent perform? but also How did we perform? What did students experience because of our collective leadership? Where did we improve? Where did we fall short? And what will we do about it?

There was another part of the process that made me smile at myself.

My Board members said some extraordinarily kind things about my leadership. I loved hearing them and I was also terribly awkward receiving them. Why aren’t we taught to simply say, thank you? Why is it sometimes easier to accept critique than a compliment?

So I am practicing:

Thank you.

Thank you for your belief in me. Thank you for your support. Thank you for trusting me with work I take incredibly seriously. And thank you to the remarkable team beside me, whose fingerprints are on every accomplishment attributed to my name.

I remain grateful for clear goals, clear outcomes, and the discipline of simplicity in an extraordinarily complex organization. I am grateful for a collective that believes our responsibility is not merely to manage a system, but to continuously make it better for children.

And I know there is so much more work before us.

I will continue to work hard. I will continue to be devoted to this district and this city. I will continue to accept accountability for the responsibilities entrusted to me.

But I will also continue to stop.
To notice.
To ask questions.
To discuss.
To write.
To reflect.

Because perhaps reflection is one of the ways we keep leadership from becoming only about achievement, position, or praise. It is how I remind myself who I was before the title, who I am while carrying it, and who I hope to remain when someday I no longer do.

This responsibility is enormous. I feel its weight.

And I remain profoundly grateful for the privilege of carrying it, not alone, but together.

I am

08/20/26

I am from el otro lado
from honking and exhaust
patience and frustration
fear and Spanglish
from crossing a border
before I understood
that some people thought borders
were supposed to tell you
where you belonged.
I am from
¿ya comieron?
and no pica tanto
from freshly fried sugary dough with cinnamon
after church on Sunday
from carne asada as an event, not a meal
that somehow always ended
with someone singing
volver, volver, volver.
I am from absent men
jail cells and deportation
and strong, overprotective women
who taught me
that survival was an inheritance
but so was joy.
I am from crossing the border to go to school
and from becoming a teacher
because somewhere along the way
I understood that education
could also be a crossing
from what is
to what might be.
I am from a classroom
then a principal's office
then schools and systems
and rooms I never imagined
someone like me
would one day be asked to lead.
I am from learning
that leadership is not how important you become
but how much possibility
you create for someone else.
Today,
I am the Superintendent
responsible for over 96 thousand students
and the second largest school system in California
of San Diego Unified School District.
But Unified
is not just the name
of the district I lead.
I think of it as an invitation.
To belong.
To contribute.
To disagree and stay in community.
To recognize that none of us
raises a child, teaches a child,
or transforms a system
alone.
I am from teachers
who saw something in me
before I could see it in myself.
From mentors who spoke my name
in rooms I had not yet entered.
From children who remind me daily
that the decisions we call
budgets
policies
initiatives
and strategic plans
eventually arrive
at somebody's desk
in somebody's classroom
and become a child's life.
And so I lead
from the border
from the classroom
from the principalship
from the community
from the contradictions
from the edges.
I am still from el otro lado.
I just understand differently now
what it means
to cross.
And perhaps that is my leadership journey:
to cross
and then turn around,
hold the door open,
and make the distance
between this side
and the other side
a little smaller
for whoever comes next.

K.S.O.N

07/28/26

Some neighborhoods announce themselves with welcome signs.

Mine announced itself with an antenna.

Long before I knew what a radio station was, before I understood that grown-ups named things after call letters and frequencies, I knew those four letters standing high above the neighborhood: KSON. They were among the first letters I learned to recognize. K. S. O. N. As soon as they appeared against the sky, I knew we were almost there.

Almost to Logan.

Almost to my uncle’s house.

Almost to my favorite cousin.

Children don’t measure distance in miles. They measure it in landmarks that promise love.

The antenna meant laughter was coming. It meant my grandmother settling into stories she had told a hundred times before. It meant someone stirring beans or roasting chiles, tortillas wrapped in towels to keep warm, murals that stretched higher than I could imagine, their colors louder than any language I knew. It meant Chicano Park before I understood history. Art before I knew the word movement. It meant Sunday afternoons riding in my uncle’s gleaming 1950s Chevy, where every turn felt like celebration.

Somewhere in those visits, I also found a word that felt like it had been waiting for me.

Chicana.

I was five years old.

I carried it home the way children carry treasures without knowing why anyone would object. My mother, practical and deeply conservative, didn’t love the word. To her, it carried politics. To me, it carried the feeling of Logan. It sounded like the murals looked. Like laughter around my uncle’s table. Like music drifting through open windows. Like a community that somehow already knew me.

I understand now that identity often arrives before explanation. We belong somewhere long before we know how to explain why.

This morning, driving that same road to Logan Memorial, I caught myself looking for those letters.

The antenna is no longer what it once was. Time has its own way of editing a city. But my heart still slows at the same place. My body remembers before my mind does.

And then another realization quietly arrived beside me.

The little girl in the backseat has become the superintendent driving the car.

What was once simply the road to my uncle’s house is now the road to children whose futures I have been entrusted to help shape. Children who are memorizing their own landmarks without realizing it. Children who are learning which streets feel like home, which adults feel like safety, which classrooms tell them they belong. Children who are, perhaps without knowing it yet, discovering words that will one day become part of who they are.

I recognize myself in them; not because our stories are the same, but because I know what it means for a community to quietly raise a child.

No one neighborhood made me.

Everyone did.

A grandmother’s tiny home. My favorite cousin. A bowl of menudo. Murals that taught me before teachers did. A 1950s Chevy. Four letters against the morning sky. A neighborhood that gave a five-year-old girl her first glimpse of herself.

It turns out memory has always been an educator.

It teaches us where we come from so we never forget what we owe those still making that same drive.

Because communities, long before they become places we serve, are places that first love us into being.

Calladita Te Ves Más Bonita

When people ask me about my why, I often think it began with a sentence, not an inspirational one, a limiting one.

"Calladita Te Ves Más Bonita" you're prettier when you keep your mouth shut. It's a phrase many Latina girls know by heart.

Sometimes it's spoken with affection, sometimes with frustration, sometimes as protection, but regardless of the intention, the message is remarkably consistent.
Take up less space, speak less, be agreeable, be beautiful, and be quiet.

I grew up with that idiom.

07/28/26

It shaped me long before I had the language to question it. As I wrote years ago, it creates an impossible choice. It conflates beauty with silence, forcing girls to believe that they can either have a voice or be accepted, but not both.

The older I became, the more I rebelled against that choice, not because I wanted to be loud, but because I wanted to be whole.(...) Education gave me something extraordinary.
It taught me that asking questions isn't disrespectful,(...) that curiosity is leadership, that disagreement can be an act of love, that using your voice isn't about speaking the most, it's about speaking when it matters most.

Today as superintendent, every decision I make is guided by that journey. My why is to create the conditions where no young person, especially no young Latina, ever feels she has to shrink herself in order to belong.

I want our schools to be places where they don't confuse compliance with confidence, where they learn that their questions have value, their stories have value, their language has value, their identities has value, their voice has value. So today when I hear "Calladita Te Ves Más Bonita," I don't reject it, I reframe it.

I offer our young Latinas something different.
"Que sepas que tu voz también es hermosa."
May you know that your voice is beautiful too, not because it's perfect, not because everyone will agree with it, but because it's yours.

My life's work isn't simply about leading a school district, it's about helping young people discover that they were never meant to fit inside someone else's definition of who they should be, especially the girls that were taught to whisper.

I hope they grow up believing something entirely different, that their brilliance deserves to be heard, that their courage deserves to be seen, and that the world becomes more beautiful every single time they decide to speak.

Manteca

My abuela always had manteca in her kitchen.

Not olive oil. Not avocado oil. Manteca. It sat there without apology, as ordinary as salt, as necessary as love.

I grew up hearing every warning about it, so I never bought any. 

Until yesterday. 
I wanted to make refried beans and, after looking everywhere for the humble little package I remembered, I found only a beautiful fifteen-dollar jar with words like organic and rendered dressed around it as if they were introducing someone important.

The beans were delicious.

This morning I made myself huevos rancheros. I let the tortilla kiss the manteca and thought, why not fry the egg there too?

The moment the egg hit the pan, my kitchen filled with my grandmother.

Not in ghost stories. In the language grandmothers prefer: smell. Sound. Sizzle.

For years I’ve been chasing her fried eggs-the ones with lace around the edges, a yolk like sunrise, a crunch that gave way to softness. I blamed my pans, my stove, my technique. Why couldn’t I make them? 

The answer had been waiting patiently all along.

Manteca.

One small decision this morning brought my abuela back into my kitchen. Abuela Concha stood beside me without saying a word. She didn’t need to. She simply handed me back a taste I’d been missing for decades. For a few quiet minutes, the distance between then and now disappeared. 

Gracias, Abuela Concha. You still know your way home.

07/25/26

Pride '26

Pride arrives dressed in rainbows, yes but also in clipboards and barricades, volunteers pointing toward parking lots, someone answering the same question for the hundredth time with the same generous smile. Joy, it turns out, has logistics. Belonging always has.

Today an entire city decided to walk toward one another. Music spilled into the streets. Hugs found old friends before words did. High fives leapt from strangers. Cameras tried their best to hold what the heart already knew. I even came home with a fan (thank you Claudia) as spectators support for marchers.

And then, there it was a yellow school bus rolling through the parade. Such an ordinary thing until it wasn't. A reminder that our work begins long before parades and continues long after them. That every young person deserves to step onto a bus, into a classroom, into themselves, knowing they matter exactly as they are.

The march wound through the heart of San Diego like a promise made visible: representation is beautiful, but it is unity that gives it breath. Thousands of people becoming one moving celebration, reminding one another that no one was ever meant to disappear.

By day's end my feet ached, the sun had claimed my body, my voice was a little hoarse from cheering, and my heart somehow larger than when morning began.

What a privilege to represent a school district that believes healthy identity development is not an extra, but an act of love. That belonging is not a slogan but a daily practice. That every child deserves to be seen before they are ever asked to achieve.

Perhaps that is what Pride has always been teaching us: when we make room for one another to become fully ourselves, an entire city becomes home.

07/18/26